Fuck you in the arse and the eye

Filed under Geektoys …

A pointless and absurd fuss has been brewing in Manchester over Sony’s use of the local cathedral as the backdrop to a shoot-em-up game.

In an attempt to simultaneously conjure up the ghost of Mary Whitehouse and give the Muslims a decent run for their money in the ‘taking offence at really stupid things’ stakes, the god-botherers are trying to get the game withdrawn. Daft sods – if a building I spent my Sundays at (e.g. the pub) were included in a computer game, I’d be fucking delighted.

According to the cleric leading the crusade campaign,

“We still fear that the next buildings to be cloned for virtual desecration could be a mosque, synagogue, temple or other church.”

I would so buy that game. You could have loads of different levels, playing as the KKK, neo-Nazis, Gujurati Hindus, Pakistani Muslims, the IDF, the Romans – the possibilities are near-endless. In ‘expert’ mode, the congregation fights back…

If you think the MMR vaccine does anything other than prevent children from dying, then I’m not overly bothered about the long-term implications of your goddamn stupid opinion: your children will die of preventable disease, whereas the children of sane people who don’t worship aliens and who don’t believe LBJ hid in shady bits of Dallas in 1963 as a career-enhancement plan will live to reproduce.

People who hold the view that – despite no evidence or plausible mechanism to suggest that they might – mobile telephone radio waves cause cancer and therefore they shouldn’t be allowed are equally mad. Unfortunately, this group’s lunacy has far greater effects on the rest of us: not only do they refuse to use mobile telephones themselves [worse, most of them don’t even refuse to use mobile telephones, because they’re hypocritical ignorant fucktards], but they lobby against demonstrably harmless communications masts.

This has a negative lifestyle consequence for those of us who quite like to be able to communicate with people. More importantly, it also means that the police can’t communicate with each other. Even as a vague libertarian, I’m quite keen on rozzers being able to tell each other about, y’know, murderers, rapists, fugitives, all that kind of stuff….

On the very-mild-plus-side, there is a tiny MMR-style evolutionary biteback: most of these hypocritical fucktards, and their kids, do use mobile phones. The emissions transmitted to a bystander from a mobile phone mast are multiple orders of magitude below those transmitted to a mobile phone user by a mobile phone. And the further away a mobile phone user is from a mobile phone mast, the higher power a mobile phone has to transmit (hence more emissions).

So the ironic news is that in the event that years of scientific study were trumped by hippies with A Bad Feeling About This and mobile-phone-head-cancer stuff were proved to be true, the actions of the anti-mast brigade would still have caused far more emission-related harm than good – the only survivors would be the dedicated mobile phone refuseniks, not the ‘no mast near my kids but I still need a phone’ NIMBYs. The tragic news is that – unlike with MMR – the associated increase in mortality wouldn’t be restricted to the idiots and their descendants.

Cash machines are a great invention. However, cunts who check their statements, top up their mobile phones, faff endlessly or indeed do anything else other than “insert-card-type-pin-press-money-button-take-card-take-money” when there’s a queue behind them are evil and should die. How the fuck do you idiots manage to take so long? Actually, I don’t care; just kill yourselves now.

Side note: the last time I was behind a crew of buffoons at a cash machine was at Gatwick Airport shortly before joining the security queue. Some senile American tourists with stupid hats and no apparent understanding of the concept of a PIN made my “quick trip to the machine” take ten minutes, by which time the security queue had doubled in length. To my amusement, however (and after several minutes’ faffing), the machine decided it was bored too and ate one of the party’s cards. Hopefully, that spoilt her holiday.

Anyway. As if the ways in which idiots misuse ATMs weren’t irritating enough, some unbelievable wanker has now come up with the ingenious idea of providing computer games for the person in front of you to play. If this function is implemented, then battering out the brains of any cunt who uses it will not only be justifiable homicide, it will be a medal-winning act of charity and compassion.

It’s a BBC piece on a single-pixel digital camera, which gets around its obvious disability by using an enormous array of mirrors and complex software processing to capture an image through sequential snapshots.

This digital micromirror device, as it is known, consists of a million or more tiny mirrors each the size of a bacterium.

“From that mirror array, we then focus the light through a second lens on to one single photo-detector – a single pixel.”

As the light passes through the device, the millions of tiny mirrors are turned on and off at random in rapid succession.

Complex mathematics then interprets the signals assembling a high resolution image from the thousands of sequential single-pixel snapshots.

The camera is hooked up to a computer to display the captured image which can take minutes to construct.

This is rather clever, and rather cool, if somewhat irrelevant for non-specialist purposes (specialist purposes are imaginable, especially if the radiation being observed is not visible light and therefore involves a more expensive sensor than a standard camera one). However…

Although at the experimental stage at the moment, if the device ever makes it to market it could make digital cameras more efficient and dramatically improve battery life by doing away with the need to process and compress each image.

Dell, Apple and Lenovo (ex-IBM) have something in common: they all make better laptops than Sony. They have something else in common, too: the Sony-supplied batteries on their laptops have an unfortunatehabit of exploding.

As with Simon Patterson’s The Great Bear, each line represents a common theme. Unlike the Great Bear, however, intersections on the map feature cross-genre artists – so Bjork is on the intersection of avant-garde, jazz, pop, electronica and soul, while the Clash are on the intersection of rock and reggae. Good effort, overall.